[978] You Pull Me Down

I went to another concert today. In my totally absent-minded approach that’s increasingly taking over my life, I didn’t even register where its actual location was until I was sitting in a restaurant 40 minutes away. It probably could have been held where I thought it was going to be, Mr. Josh Groban didn’t draw that large of a crowd for a Thursday, but that’s not important. The sequence of events in my body and mind during it was, at least briefly. Bitches be talking.

You might know, I’ve complained about how we seemed to have collectively forgotten that you need to shut the fuck up in a movie theater. I lamented that I could readily predict one in three movies I was going to have to “shush,” say, “Shut the fuck up,” or otherwise adjust my posture relative to some dumb cunt sitting near me. Well, this last time, as two whispery, coughy, and ever-undulating obese people carried on as they found the last Jurassic Park movie more and more boring, I just moved to the other side of the theater.

At the concert, at all concerts, I wear earplugs. If I didn’t, I’d probably lose my hearing within the course of a year. If I can hear you talking, laughing, or otherwise being an oblivious and entitled cunt, on top of the music no less, you’re being too loud. If you’re that way for song after song, and I’m growing more and more agitated, that I managed to respond to it in the way that I did I’m rather impressed with. My adrenaline shot through the roof as I stared them down, which, of course, they didn’t notice. I literally turned around and just watched them for 3 minutes.

Let’s set the scene. They’re about 7 seats away and 2 rows back. 3 middle-aged women, and one who brought her daughter. I could sum it up with, “It’s Karens, you know the type,” we are in Noblesville, after all, but that feels cheap if still correct. I’m getting jittery. I’ve accidentally purchased an entire bottle of wine for $42 which I had zero desire to finish. I’ve also just eaten the world’s soupiest snow-cone.

I got to thinking. I didn’t want to make them about me. I, pretty habitually, can turn things about me well without my desire or intention. I rehearse the lines I might say. “Hey! Shut the fuck up!” Classic. Do I look like a dweeb around all of these ageless greys and just make an exasperated shush and add my finger to my lips to really sell it? I shouldn’t have to be thinking about any of this shit! I’m not even some major fanboy of Josh Groban, but fucking gas is expansive, and I live an hour and a half away, and I’m pissing away even more money on wine and sugar, and I just want to sit here in the moment with a good singer without constantly jerking my head over my shoulder to investigate your dumb fucking ass.

Finally, I snap. I jerk around and yell out, “Hey, are you enjoying the concert!? It’s good right!? You enjoying yourself? Can you hear it okay!?” They get Karen-face and one attempts to turn it into a conversation about how they’ve been talking the entire time…I turn around and reinsert my earplug. They talk even louder for the back half of the song. They don’t speak for the next. They continue, ever-slightly muted for the rest of the concert afterward. I still want to fucking stab the one in particular.

It’s not that “all people” are a certain way. It’s that today, the worst of what it means to be a person has been given such license that we all carry on like that bitch isn’t in the wrong. And not just in the wrong, but wrong in a deep and profound way. She came to a concert to disrespect the artist, the people around her, and when confronted, doubled the fuck down. Can I think of a more on-the-nose analogue to this Faustian nightmare that is Trumpism? My blood pressure is skyrocketing trying not to be the sore thumb about the raging bloody cunts bleeding into our collective experience. I remain extremely confident that no one else is going to say anything, and if they feel the same pulse and stress that I did, they won’t handle it in as contemplative or a proactive way.

I’m very disoriented. It confuses me when I reach out to 3 to 5 people, and get no response all day, particularly if I know their phone behavior. I’ve had next to nothing to do in this “training” period, so I’ve had a lot of idle time at home, cleaning and rearranging things, and ordering more not-precisely crap from Amazon. I spent, and this must be a form of self-deceptive theater, YEARS avoiding reading this manga I find very interesting, and with the books in front of me, I’m dragging it out. The goal isn’t to get it done, like so many bad TV shows. I enjoy it. It’s intriguing where so little else is. I want to sit with it and think about it and escape into its lurid landscape.

But, that’s what I want out of my life. I want books to be a playground, not an alternate reality I’m desperate for. I want to live in a world where people shut the fuck up and respect each other, and none of us need finishing school to figure that shit out. I want to live in a world where the minority zealots don’t capture the majority psychologically. But I don’t. I live in a quiet place, by myself, in a tick-ridden field and occasionally pop my head out at the prospect of capitalizing on the misery or distracting myself with a shiny new stage performance. And they’re coming for that too, like they’re coming for libraries, and fucking water!

When is it over? When will the deluge of opinions about how to conduct life coalesce into either enough death that whomever is left over can try something new, or we just stop letting the mouthy cunts dictate the noise? There’s a goddamn performance and work on display every day that we just cede or ignore. Like so many texts and so many blogs with so many words that speak to who?